Love, war and German

“One Absolutely Happy Village” was played for the 250th time at the Pyotr Fomenko Workshop

– The play “One Absolutely Happy Village” is Fomenko’s second attempt at this play. The first time was with students at GITIS. On your course?

– No, it was the course in front of us. I'll correct you - this is not a play, but a story. I don’t know exactly how they worked on it then, for the first time. Pyotr Naumovich said that the students made some sketches. For example, he recalled how scenes about one of the characters, the Cow, were made. She gave birth to a calf! In the “Workshop” Pyotr Naumovich again turned to this material and this time brought all the sketches to the stage.

– How did this performance begin?

– As usual: if my memory serves me right, we took the story and began to read. We read it all and then narrowed it down to a theatrical composition, which we then worked with.

– It seems that a huge number of performances in your theater began as independent works.

– Yes, we have internal screenings where everyone can show everything. They are called “trial and error evenings.” And several performances were born precisely from those requests and proposals. But this was more about acting. Pyotr Naumovich, when he started a new work, always already knew the outline on which he would weave the pattern. He knew what his performance would be like, and we were already following him. At the rehearsals of “The Village” I learned tremendous patience. We sometimes lay for a long time in these wooden sets, waiting for our scenes. Sometimes they even fell asleep.

- Why did you fall asleep? Did you work at night?

“At the rehearsals of “The Village” I learned enormous patience”

– We could work with one scene for a very long time. And everyone should be on stage at this moment. 30 minutes is nothing, but when it’s an hour, two, three, you already understand that you can’t get in, you can’t get out, you can’t do anything, and you begin to sag. But this happened unnoticed by the director. “The Village” is an ensemble production; it’s not for nothing that the play is called that way, and not, say, by the names of the main characters. This is a very subtle performance, because it is tied to little things, nuances, and if one artist does something wrong, then the whole action no longer goes as planned. It seems that this can be said about all performances. But especially about this one. It has special, certain intonations. When we introduced new people, it was difficult. Not because they couldn’t cope, but because it turned out to be not so easy to explain.

– Did all the new ones who were brought in cope?

- Certainly. And the performance acquired a new sound and nuances. I recently got the chance to watch the performance from the outside - I am now playing in line with Irina Gorbacheva.

- And why?

– There were technical reasons, and Ira agreed to help us - she was introduced to my role. It was fair to give her the opportunity to continue playing.

– Your replacement is not related to fatigue - is the production already 13 years old?

“You can’t get tired of my role.” It seems to me that it is more difficult for the main characters. In general, there are performances where everything is done in such a way that you don’t even notice that you are performing them. You just live, breathe, perceive, and all this is so natural for you! “Village” for me is one of these performances.

– Is leaving a performance always painful?

– When a performance is born through the joint efforts of many people, it is difficult if one component falls out.

– Has the performance changed over the years?

- Changed. It seems to me that this can be said about any performance. There is a lot of personal stuff in it. And over time, not only age changes, but also the feeling of the world and oneself. You already do some things differently. But the viewer still reads what is intended by the director. With Pyotr Naumovich we worked through everything right down to turning the head.

– So he led more here than relied on the artists?

“We did some scenes without him and then showed them to him. For example, about women who water potatoes. Teacher Vera Petrovna Kamyshnikova and I worked and “depicted” something. Basically, what remained in the performance was what we came up with ourselves back then. Pyotr Naumovich himself very clearly showed what and how the actors should play. This was generally his way of working - to first let everything pass through himself. The author of the story, Boris Vakhtin, was his friend, and, of course, Pyotr Naumovich understood and felt him more than we did. He invented the space himself - all these basins with water, ropes, hemp, buckets. He was very particular about his costumes. It seems: just think, you can wear any rag! No! There is a lot of convention, a lot of theatrical images. But in this he demanded absolutely unconditional residence. This applied to objects, clothing, makeup. Pyotr Naumovich always demanded the truth, saying: “No, don’t play like that! This is from some bad Soviet movie about a village in the thirties and forties!!”

– How was the first part of the work - analysis, reading? Pre-war, war and post-war times are still very close. What did you rely on?

– Everything was born associatively and figuratively. We relied on words, because it is on them that the fabric of action is tied. The person telling the story relies only on what he says. And this was the subject of the game. We studied how the words were written, how they were arranged with each other, and naturally, we listened to the music of that time.

– And Fomenko himself, due to his age, was also a witness.

– Yes, and he talked a lot. He had an interesting gift: without knowing it, he felt very well the nature of the village. I doubt that Pyotr Naumovich visited the village very often. But I felt in my gut that this was some kind of nonsense, but this was exactly what was needed.

– “One Absolutely Happy Village” is performed on your smallest stage. Was there any idea to move it to a larger one?

– We took “Derevnya” on tour a couple of times, playing in a large space, for example on the Alexandrinsky stage. But it seemed to me that this was no longer what I wanted - the detail was gone, the sound was moving away, a hum appeared. There was this strange effect everywhere. And only once, in Germany on a small stage, was it better. Still, this is a chamber performance. There’s a tree stump nearby, there’s water in the basin, there’s a walkway. It's more interesting when it's all crowded.

– Thirteen years is a very respectable age for a performance. Why has it been preserved like this?

– The answer may sound pathetic: there is a strong spirit in the performance. This is the most important thing - artists may change, but nothing can break the spirit. And in “The Village” there are such humanly understandable themes: war, the pre-war and post-war periods - you will involuntarily play very honestly.

"One absolutely happy village"

“The Village” based on the story by Boris Vakhtin, like many others, I hold not only among the best of the best performances by Pyotr Fomenko. It occupies an important place in my treasury of my own theatrical shocks, of which I have accumulated quite a few over the course of my life, but not a lot either. “Village” there is adjacent to Vladimir Vasiliev’s Spartacus, Nikolai Karachentsov’s Till, Evgeniy Kolobov’s “Mary Stuart,” Lev Dodin’s “Untitled Play,” Anatoly Efros’ “Tartuffe,” and Anatoly Efros’s “Comrade, Believe!” Yuri Lyubimov, from “Bolero” by Maurice Bejart.

The amazing discovery of this performance is in the very fact of its life - on stage, in the actor's life, in the paradoxical poetry of the author's language. The kind of world the director created here - non-existent and at the same time warm, alive, authentic. “Village” was his debt to the memory of his friend, the early deceased St. Petersburg writer Boris Vakhtin. Their relationship went through a dramatic period of breakups, but ultimately Iris Murdoch’s brilliant axiom worked: “A work of art has the last laugh.” The revenge of enemies and the slander of friends turned out to be powerless in the face of what united two real artists - the writer and the director, and the play was born in spite of censorship, slander, and the uneradicated deformities of ideology.

The play is about love and people. That there is probably nothing more valuable in the world than a person. And there is nothing more valuable than love.

See eternity in one moment,

A huge world in a grain of sand.

In a single handful - infinity

And the sky is in the cup of a flower.

Such is the wisdom... That’s what I thought when I was going to take Tonino Guerra to the “Village”. He came to Moscow, as usual, for a long time and, being a person immensely open to new things and passionately curious about the life around him, he wanted to see “The Village,” which he had not had time to see before. But the Fomenko Theater knew, saw “War and Peace,” admired and considered Pyotr Naumovich (whom he called, slightly distorting Russian words, “Flamenco”) one of our best directors along with Yu. P. Lyubimov and Anatoly Vasiliev. (Tonino Guerra, of course, was a real fragment of the Italian Renaissance, miraculously brought into modern times. They - Tonino and Petr Naumovich - came into my life almost simultaneously in August 2006. And they left after each other in 2012... That’s how they stand side by side in my memory are two titans, two dearest people...) While Tonino, Laura, and I were driving from their house on Krasnye Vorota to the Fomenko Theater on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, I, as best I could, mixing Russian and Italian words, described and almost “ “lost” the performance. I was sure that the aesthetics of “The Village” was precisely that seemingly naive, poetic, metaphorical and sincere theater, the expressiveness of which is such that words are sometimes unnecessary. That is, of course, Boris Vakhtin’s language is unique, but my confidence that “The Village” can be understood without words and is capable of striking to the very heart was unshakable. Tonino, whom I dared to call my friend, always said that he “feels tenderness for mistakes” - he liked the flaws in appearance, words, language - this emphasized individuality. And he also said that “one must strive to create more than banal perfection.” My belief that “The Village” was definitely a performance for him only grew stronger. I saw how the performance began, how Tonino, sitting on a chair in the first row, leaned forward, some kind of internal energy arose between him and the stage and... I forgot about him. Because the “Village” appeared in front of me in all its amazing and seemingly simple nature. And no matter how many times I watched the performance before and after, I never managed to remember myself for a minute in those two and a little hours - who am I, why, where from, what is my name? Pyotr Fomenko's hypnosis is such that you feel nothing to do with it. And all of you are there, where women in galoshes and rough stockings, in white shirts and sundresses walk along the walkways, sharply breaking in the lower back, working in the fields. And then Polina Agureeva with a yoke and full buckets (how does such a fragile woman do this?), flirtatiously and indescribably gracefully “kicks” away from her suitor, makes her way past Mikheev (Evgeny Tsyganov). And he, in an inimitable, courageous patter, recites a monologue about the yoke, which awakens such irresistible desires in a man when it puts pressure on such women’s shoulders: “Nothing knocks me out of the saddle of balance like the yoke, exciting me unbearably.” The entire first part of the play is a story about love, which knows no prohibitions and conventions, overcomes obstacles and carries the heroes, as the river carries them, in which Polina and Mikheev unite for the first time. For Pyotr Fomenko, this performance is the most sensual, full of seething passions and intoxication with human nature. And above all, a woman endowed with the unique intonations of Polina Agureeva, all-conquering femininity and alluring body heat. You can go to the ends of the earth for this woman. In order to convey the revelation of love, he needs very little - the blue, wet canvas of the river, the heroine’s bare arms, her thin ankles and wrists, her voice breaking with passion and the feeling of flight, when on the wave of passion and the flow of the river the heroes soar up and fall...

Before my eyes was the duet of Polina Agureeva and Evgeny Tsyganov, and somewhere in the depths of emotional memory another duet came to life - Polina Agureeva and Sergei Taramaev, the first performer of the role of Mikheev. I am very impressed by Tsyganov’s courageous nature, his strong acting personality, those manifestations of masculinity that a woman cannot help but respond to. He is charming, reckless, and there is a special human breed in him that does not allow a man to stay at home when war comes. But at the same time, Mikheev Taramaeva is like “first love.” For all his subtle lyrical appearance, he was an expression of the essence of Fomenkov’s flood of feelings: an uncontrollable, mischievous, simple-minded, beautiful, obsessed person. Of course, he could not have appeared in any village, or in any city, or anywhere at all, except in theatrical fantasy. And even then, thanks to the director’s passionate desire to create just such a hero.

What did Pyotr Fomenko use to build his “Village”? From wooden walkways, splashes of water, rattling basins and buckets, rags, a window frame and rubble, Polina’s wedding wreath. Here the well with the crane is played by the ironic Karen Badalov in a shaggy hat. He sacredly keeps all the secrets entrusted to him, even about the pearl necklace at the bottom - a gift from Mikheev’s loving father (he was enough for everyone) not to his wife, but to her sister. The well then appears in this necklace, and then appears in the image of an ancient sage grandfather, listening to the earth rumble from the coming invasion. And he also wove it from a strange mixture of genre scenes and poetic symbols - like the story of the Cow (which actress has not played this role!) or the passage of women at the harvest, singing: “Women, go back!”, “Forward!” And in Fomenko’s “Village” there is continuous music – folk tunes “I believed, I believed, I knew”, “Spring will not come for me” or a song from Pyotr Naumovich’s favorite gramophone “Chelita”: “Ay-ya-ya-ay! Don’t look in vain, In our village, really, there is no other Chelita like this.”

For the war, on the same patch of the Green Hall of the old stage of the theater, other images were found - rattling sheets of iron in which soldiers in raincoats are wrapped, the acrid smoke of the Belomor, a narrow corner of a trench and a blade of grass that a soldier chews in the shelter. And then the fantastic cloud-paradise where the deceased Mikheev ends up, and then his comrade in arms, poor fellow Kuropatkin (Tomas Mockus), Fomenko, together with the artist Vladimir Maksimov, came up with a simple, self-forgetting idea - a wicker trampoline-hammock, where it is so comfortable to lie and watch those who remained on earth. The fact that it is natural for the heroine of the play to talk with her dead husband, argue with him, swear (what to do if the twin boys are uncontrollable?) is surprisingly accurate. Favorite people, wherever they are, are always with us. And the image of paradise, so simple and laconic, expressively characterizes the style of Pyotr Fomenko’s theater: not psychological and not realistic, supernatural, fantastic, conventional and beautiful. The theater of the poet and lyricist - open, fearlessly exposing his heart and allowing the public to play on the strings of his own soul “with childish agility.” What is this degree of frankness worth? What heartfelt effort and what torment and doubt? But, undoubtedly, one can say about the creator of “The Village”: “He wants to live at the cost of torment, at the cost of painful worries. He buys the sounds of heaven, He does not take glory for nothing.”

And now it is no longer love, the river, the earth, the flesh, fierce disputes in the struggle for primacy between the greedily and passionately in love Polina and Mikheev. Not witty passages in the remarks of fellow villagers, not funny details in the behavior of the inhabitants of the village, through each of which Fomenkov’s grin appears. What is war like in Pyotr Fomenko’s play? Slouched Polina with dark circles under her eyes, a funeral, the foreman’s harassment and the arrival of the captured German Franz (Ilya Lyubimov) to help with the housework. And suddenly, in this pain, persistent melancholy and the almost physical presence of the murdered husband, another love is born - simply, like a coincidence, a destiny from above and the blessing of the departed. The incredible courage of the director is that in his poetic and, despite the abundance of everyday touches, translucent performance, he introduced, sensitively following the author of the story Boris Vakhtin, the theme of this forbidden love. An “unpopular” and for many unacceptable story about the love of a Russian woman, who lost her husband in this terrible war, for a man who fought on the side of the enemy. But for Pyotr Fomenko, love cannot be a mistake, it cannot be a betrayal. Love is always right. He believed in this - and not only in the theater. Therefore, nothing is explained in the performance, nothing is shown or commented on.

The viewer’s imagination connects to theatrical reality, and no one thinks to ask why Polina changed her quilted jacket for a white shawl with silk tassels, why the women sing in polyphony the song “My little darling is at the front, he is not fighting alone” and why the nervous, handsome Franz brings a gramophone and starts a record with the song “Lili Marlene” sung hoarsely by Marlene Dietrich. And in a broken voice, with difficulty coping with his interrupted breathing, he translates the words of the song - a little incorrectly, but in fact amazingly accurately: “In front of the barracks, in front of the large gate, there was a lantern and it still stands... From a quiet place, from the depths of the Earth, as if in a dream, I will rise, in love with you, like a dog... When the evening fog begins to swirl, who will stand with you under the lantern? With you, Lili Marlene...” I don’t know more precise words about love, which is stronger than death. And the best theatrical finale in my life. And I don’t know if there is another performance in the world that can evoke such feelings. Not even feelings, but passions, because he was made by a passionate person, the owner of a brave heart that can accommodate both pain and happiness.

And of course, all this can be told without words - in the language of images and emotions. Simple and comprehensive, wise and important. How happy I was that Tonino Guerra, poet and storyteller, neorealist and dreamer, Oscar winner and peasant from Sant'Arcangelo, who himself was in German captivity during the Second World War, confirmed my guess: “Natasha, I understood everything. This my theater..." They talked about this after the performance with the actors and the author of the play, when they all gathered together in the empty hall...

...White clothes - shirts and underpants - of the dead, fluttering moths on wires in the hands of the artists (the "children's" theater - naive and touching) and the shimmer of artistic whistling "Tango of the Nightingale" - this is how the dead come to the living at the end of the performance. Because in “One Absolutely Happy Village” everyone is together. And that doesn't happen. Although…

2007